Knowledge and Justification

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1 starts from the tenet that the goal of cognition is the transfer of information in the form of justified true belief. The focus of this book is the development of a theory of justification in the tradition of enlightenment epistemology. Its leading idea is foundation-theoretic: to reach knowledge we must not legitimize our beliefs by external authorities but justify them by rational arguments. Early foundation-theoretic epistemology was naive, since its conception of justification required certainty. Certainty was discovered to be untenable by analytic epistemologists of the 20th century, because the justification of most of our beliefs cannot be confined to deduction from evidence, but instead requires induction and abduction which cannot convey certainty but only, at most, high probability. However, the illusion of indefeasible knowledge was not only held by premodern philosophers but is also ubiquitous in commonsense intuitions of knowledge. This is revealed by an analysis of two paradoxes of knowledge: the lottery paradox and the Gettier paradox. Both paradoxes turn out to be partially unsolvable because of tensions intrinsic to commonsense intuitions associated with knowledge. It is argued that instead of trying to rationalize incoherent intuitions, epistemology should improve the commonsense concept by transforming it into the scientific concept of a justified (true) belief whose justification makes it highly probable and reveals its error probabilities.

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